CHATHAM HOUSE
Israel has the capacity to significantly damage Hamas with a ground offensive. But politics will restrain it throughout
What does victory look like for Israel, and is it even achievable?
EXPERT COMMENT
17 OCTOBER 2023 3 MINUTE READ
Bilal Y. Saab
Associate Fellow, Middle East and North Africa Programme
There is political logic behind the Israeli government’s declaration that it will ‘wipe Hamas off the Earth’.
The Israeli public want to see Hamas destroyed once and for all, given the unprecedented mass murder it just committed.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his colleagues, already under intense pressure for allowing the attack to take place (and for putting Israel in a vulnerable position by pursuing anti-democratic policies) were compelled to make big promises. Their maximalist goals reflect the stakes in their fight for political survival.
Israeli security rationale is understandable, too: eliminating your enemy, as opposed to containing them, is the surest way to prevent them from hurting you again.
Many will say there is no military solution to deep-rooted armed insurgencies and what is essentially a political conflict. And in most cases that is true.
The Sri Lankan army did defeat the Tamil Tigers in 2009, but at an enormous cost: it took Colombo 26 years to crush its resilient foe, and the death toll was estimated by the United Nations to be anywhere from 80,000 to 100,000.
That is not to suggest that the Israelis will replicate the Sri Lankans and destroy Hamas, but they certainly have the capacity to significantly downgrade its military capabilities. The question is at what price?
Victory for Israel
Israel’s generals are under no illusion that they can ‘wipe out Hamas’.
Their focus will be to damage as much as possible and ideally remove Hamas’s combat power – missiles, rockets, drones, man-portable air defence systems, and anti-tank weapons.
Their focus will be to damage as much as possible and ideally remove Hamas’s combat power – missiles, rockets, drones, man-portable air defence systems, and anti-tank weapons. They will also target military command centres and underground tunnels. If they destroy the majority of this infrastructure and Hamas manpower, they can declare victory.
Secondary to that objective is the release of Israeli and international hostages held by Hamas. In theory, the two goals go hand in hand, but in reality they don’t, necessarily.
The IDF must check Hamas’s warfighting capabilities before it can put itself in a position to free the hostages. And so long as Hamas has guns, it will be able to make a rescue hazardous.
Israeli specialized units trained in urban warfare, backed by conventional troops and close air support, will systematically go from door to door to try to eliminate Hamas leaders and possibly capture some to force a swap.
Victory for Hamas
Many things could go wrong for Israel. Casualty tolerance among the ranks of the IDF, and the Israeli public, will be key.
Although most of the public is behind a ground offensive, public opinion will shift – and thus, influence the flow of operations against Hamas – if many Israeli soldiers return to their loved ones in body bags.
That is something Hamas will surely exploit. The group will not go down without a vicious fight. In fact, they have planned for it, preparing for a ground incursion over several years with the help of Iran and Hezbollah.
Hamas’s senior leaders are not necessarily bluffing when they say that their dream scenario is an Israeli invasion of Gaza
Hamas’s senior leaders are not necessarily bluffing when they say that their dream scenario is an Israeli invasion of Gaza. Their plan, just like Hezbollah’s in its 34-day war with Israel in southern Lebanon in 2006, is to trap, bleed, and break the morale of the Israelis. For them, mere survival or the denial of Israel’s objectives constitutes victory.
There is also an inherent tension in Israel’s military approach. On the one hand, the IDF must go hard against Hamas to deny it more opportunities to kill and hurt Israelis and to possibly restore deterrence, which has taken a huge hit.
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But it also has to exercise caution: indiscriminate and heavy bombing of Hamas targets could very easily kill hostages or lead to them being executed by their Hamas captors.
If bombing creates increasingly large numbers of Palestinian civilian casualties it could also weaken the support of key allies like the US and will certainly feed anti-Israel feeling in the region.
Crushing Hamas militarily also assumes that Israel has perfect intelligence on Hamas’s locations and capabilities.
But the Hamas attacks of 7 October constitute the worst intelligence failure in Israel’s history, so confidence in Israel’s ability to analyse its enemy’s capabilities and intentions is understandably not very high.
Image — An Israeli soldier directs a Merkava battle tank as it deploys with other tanks along the border with the Gaza Strip in southern Israel on October 13, 2023. (Photo by ARIS MESSINIS/AFP via Getty Images)
Crushing Hamas also assumes that the fight will not expand and involve Hezbollah, either from the Lebanese or the Syrian front.
Neither Iran nor Hezbollah is suicidal, but it is hard to believe that they will sit this one out if they perceive that Israel is about to disarm their close partner – and neutralize the Palestinian theatre as a result. (This is a core theatre to the Iran-led axis given its religious significance).
If an Israeli ground incursion does lead to regional escalation, the operational objective of crushing Hamas militarily becomes a lot more challenging
If an Israeli ground incursion does lead to regional escalation, the operational objective of crushing Hamas militarily becomes a lot more challenging.
The limits
There’s a limit to Israeli military, political, and psychological bandwidth, no matter how many weapons it receives from the West. A multi-front war is one of Israel’s worst nightmares – something it always sought to avoid in its past confrontations with Arab armies.
Most importantly, Israel will have to take account of US perceptions, especially if it expects to continue to receive military assistance from Washington.
If the ground incursion turns very bloody and many more civilians die, US pressure on Israel to alter or halt operations will be a huge factor, challenging the IDF’s ability to attain its operational objectives.
Israel’s military is more than capable of destroying Hamas. But an offensive will not take place in isolation: the military must account for the opinion of its allies, the threats of its enemies and wavering public opinion at home. All are significant, and highly unpredictable.
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